Eliminating the Coordination Tax: Notes from Augment’s Distribution AI Summit

Last week, leaders and operators from distributors representing more than $200 billion in combined revenue gathered with us at Cox Enterprises headquarters in Atlanta for Augment’s inaugural Distribution AI Summit. The room spanned operations leaders, CIOs, and over a dozen CEOs. We spent the day discussing the central question of how to use AI to transform wholesale distribution.

Distribution is an industry ripe for disruption with AI. Distributors hold decades of expertise that no system captures. Every order still runs through someone's inbox, phone, or text thread. Meanwhile, boards want proof before an AI pilot reaches production.

Every session at our Summit came back to these central problems and how agentic AI can solve them. If I had to name a single theme that dominated the event, it would be that the best distributors win on expertise and trust, and AI will compound both for the companies that move first.

Augment is the AI operating platform for the entire supply chain

The Summit capped off a record-breaking few months for Augment. Since we expanded to wholesale distribution in April 2026, the combined distributor revenue of our customers has grown fivefold, from $20 billion at launch to more than $100 billion today. Across the supply chain, our AI teammate Augie is on pace to return 1.3 million hours to operators this year.

Leading distributors like Johnstone Supply Heartland Group and White Cap now use Augie. Additionally, cistribution leaders Garland Williams, Nelson Squires, and Jeffrey Beall have joined Augment as advisors to ensure Augie fits the way distributors actually run their businesses.

Why AI Will Make the Best B2B Distributors Indispensable

Augment CEO Harish Abbott opened the Summit by zeroing in on the coordination tax: the manual work that drains operator productivity in wholesale distribution. Historically, distribution operators have coordinated 24/7 to keep goods moving through the supply chain. A single order can require hundreds of emails, calls, texts, and system updates that a person has to process, respond to, and act on. While waiting on human processing, information clogs the supply chain the way plaque clots an artery. With slow information comes slow decisions and a slower flow of goods.

The result is a coordination tax on every shipment that has felt insurmountable. Until now.

Agentic AI is the first tool than can eliminate the coordination tax for distributors. Harish explained how AI agents can process large contexts across systems, reason per your SOPs, and act like you best operator. With agentic AI, distributor operators can shift their focus to the high value work that drives business growth. Very soon, everyone in supply chain will be using agentic AI to rapidly scale their business. The distributors who adopt agentic AI now have the chance to be ahead of the rest of the pack.

Harish also shared what that shift looks like for one customer. An operator at a $12 billion distributor shared that “Labor Day weekend was the first weekend in 20 years where we only had one logistics operator working. Augie handled every check call on our shipments that weekend."

Meet Augie, the AI Teammate for B2B Distribution

Next, I came on stage to demo they key workflows we are transforming for distribution operators today, including sales order entry and appointment scheduling.

Distributors can book a customized demo to see how Augie can transform their business. As I shared on stage, getting started with Augie does not require an ERP or TMS project, nor does it require an IT queue. Augie works off the exports your team already runs, shortening time to value.

Ride the Wave or Get Pulled Under: A Conversation with Frank Blake and Joe Lonsdale

For our keynote panel we were joined by Frank Blake, former Chairman and CEO of The Home Depot, who rebuilt the retailer's supply chain around a new network of distribution centers. Also on stage with us was Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir and spent spent two decades funding the companies that disrupt incumbents through 8VC.

During the conversation, Frank made the case for AI in distribution. He described how in some industries, you have to squint to see how AI will play out and where it will pay off. In B2B distribution, the opportunity is clear as day. Repetitive coordination and repetitive workflows hold operators back from the work they were hired to do, which is to serve customers and grow the business. In Frank's view, AI offers distributors an urgent opportunity with a big impact.

Joe brought the investor's perspective to the same question. He discussed how the workforce and the ERP evolve as AI takes on more of the work, and where M&A fits as distributors decide how to move.

The Business Case for AI in B2B Distribution: A Conversation with Garland Williams and Stu Tisdale

In our customer fireside chat, Garland Williams, CEO of Brooks Safety Solutions, and Stu Tisdale, SVP and Chief Experience Officer at ADI, walked the audience through their path from an AI pilot to production. They shared what workflows they started with, how they won approval, and which guardrails they set before AI agents came into contact with customers.

To get started with AI, Garland urged the room to hit singles before going for home runs. Start with one workflow, test it, and build trust with your team before scaling across the business.

Stu gave the room three tests to find the best problem for AI to tackle first:

• The problem should frustrate your team every day.

• More hires should not solve it.

• The work should run on a large dataset that refreshes often.

Both leaders landed on the same advice. Pick a problem your team already feels, prove the value fast, and let that first win earn the trust for the next one.

What’s Working in Wholesale Distribution: Breakout Sessions and Peer Roundtables

Following our mainstage sessions, we hosted breakout sessions focused on how distributors can scale their competitive advantages.

Justin Hall, Augment's Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer, moderated a panel with J-Ann Tio Toles, Chief Strategy Officer at Arrive Logistics, and Shaleen Devgun, Executive Vice President and Chief Innovation and Technology Officer at Schneider. Distributors' private fleets often run empty on the way back from a delivery, because backhaul matching has been too complex to do well. The panel explored how AI can match those return legs with outside freight demand in real time. They also discussed how a signals-based, double-opt-in approach lets a distributor fill those trucks without handing over its lanes, rates, or customer data.

Nick Johnson, Augment's Head of Commercial for Wholesale Distribution, moderated a panel with Nelson Squires, former COO of Wesco, and Jeffrey Beall, former President of PHCP at Affiliated Distributors. Nelson and Jeffrey both warned the audience that expertise only stays a moat if your AI vendor cannot train on it, then sell it to the distributor down the street. To protect your data, the panel urged every distributor to ask how a vendor uses customer data before they share a single record. Panelists also made the case for audit trails and source-grounded answers, so a team can see why an AI teammate made each decision.

Some of the day's best conversations happened off stage, in our closed-door roundtables. More than a dozen CEOs sat down with Harish for a peer conversation with no slides and no pitch. Several attendees told us the conversation was the highlight of their day. Operations, IT, supply chain, and finance leaders also attended their own roundtables by function.

Where Capital and Technology Are Going in Distribution: A conversation with Peter McCoy

We closed the day on the patio with Peter McCoy, Partner at Rockefeller Capital, which holds significant investments in distribution. Peter shared where capital is flowing in the sector right now, what separates the distributors that compound from the ones that stall, and how they weigh M&A against organic growth. We also discussed where technology and AI now fit in a value creation plan.

Join us at a Distributor AI Roundtable

Peer conversations only happen when people show up, so thank you to every leader who traveled to Atlanta. Thank you to Frank Blake and Joe Lonsdale, Garland Williams and Stu Tisdale, and every panelist who shaped the conversation on stage. Thank you to the Cox Enterprises team, who opened their headquarters to us, and to the Augment team who ensured the day ran smoothly.

Although our Summit has concluded, we’re going to keep these conversations going. Over the next four months, we will host roundtables for supply chain and operations executives in four cities, starting in Chicago on October 22 and 23. Next we’ll head to Houston on November 19 and 20, then Dallas on December 5, and back to Atlanta on January 13 and 14. Each event will give leaders more time to compare notes with their peers. Reach out to our team to save you seat.